CHAPTER XX.

If thou long'st To have the story of thy infamous fortunes Serve for discourse in ordinaries and taverns, Thou art in the way; or to confound thy name, Keep on, thou canst not miss it; Keep the left hand still, it will bring thee to it. _The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cut-purse_.

With a better fortune than had awaited the volunteer, Herman Hunter stepped into the grot; but with much less display of heroism; for he no sooner found himself in presence of the renowned Hawk of the Hollow than he bent his eyes upon the ground, and stood silent before him.

"You are come at last!" said the refugee, giving him a piercing look, and with a voice none the less expressive of indignation for being subdued to the lowest tones, as if he feared a witness even in the dead malefactor; "you are come at last; and the son of my father comes with my enemies and hunters!"

"So I come," said the painter, raising his eyes, and speaking firmly; "I come as the friend, who, having saved you from one danger, desires to rescue you from another yet greater. I warned you last night,--nay, I sent you word long since, that you were watched: I betrayed a confidence reposed in me by one it was a double duplicity to deceive, in order that you might escape the net that was secretly closing around you. Nay, I discovered the presence and machinations of the daring spy, who but this morning was selling you into the hands of your enemies; I found his letter, and left it where you were sure to obtain it."----

"Ay; while you were yourself playing the fool among the Independents, and leaving me to the care of a stupid ploughman and a dotish old woman!"

"It was all I could," said Herman: "I knew it was better I should be on the ground, when the officers came. Had I not been there, to join the first of the hunters, as you call them, and to fire an alarm in the hollow, neither your own cunning nor the fleetness of the roan horse could have saved you from capture."

"It was bravely done," said the refugee, with a softer voice, "and it will excuse what is passed. Where found you this dog's paper? and how?"

"Near the park-gate, under a bush, where I saw the man hide it, as I approached the place by accident. This fellow knows all your haunts: will he not bring the troops to this very spot?"

The refugee laughed, and at that moment Herman heard a noise on the bough of the oak tree, as of some animal rending away the bark; and looking up, he beheld what he had not before seen in the gloom,--the body of the dead traitor swinging with a sort of jerking, convulsive motion, as if still alive. The rope had slipped a little along the bough, and though soon arrested by some knot or other roughness, it was some moments before the motion entirely ceased. The dreadful and unexpected spectacle of a man, who, it was evident, the painter thought, had made his escape, thus hanging dead before him, filled him with horror, and he exclaimed at once,

"Oh, Oran! Oran! it is this dreadful cruelty of spirit which has made you what you are,--which has made us all what we are! For God's sake, let us cut him down, and see if he be yet alive."

"He was stiff before the rope touched his neck," said Oran, grimly; "I never struck _twice_ with the hatchet. Let him hang: he died the death of a spy and betrayer. I have invited the county to his death-bed!"

"Daring, as well as cruel! Why do you linger here? It is plain, you are surrounded: before the sun sets the whole county will be out; and, to-morrow, there will not be a den of the woods, or a hollow of the hills, left unvisited."

"Why, this is what I want!" cried the fierce outlaw; "the general has tied my hands to act only on the defensive; and here are forty devils with heads of iron and fingers of fire, that are lying asleep in the woods like winter bears, for want of something to warm the blood in them. I am ready."

"Ready to die!" said Herman, solemnly; "ready to throw away your life at the bidding of a master, or the prompting of an insane passion. Fly, while you yet may: the attempt to rescue young Asgill must be now fruitless, as it is needless--even the Americans say, his life is in no danger. Fly, then, Oran, and give up your bloody designs in this fatal Hollow. Hearken to me, Oran,"----

"Hearken to _me_," said the outcast, sternly. "Has your blood turned to milk, and your heart to water? Are your wounds healed, your bones knit, your strength restored, and do you talk of leaving Hawk-Hollow at this moment? What is this they say of you? You were among the foremost of the rejoicing fools at the Hawks' Nest--have you turned American?"

"I was born upon these hills; but I will not strike the friends and countrymen of my father."

"Will you strike his foes?"

"They are in the grave with him," said the youth, sorrowfully; "and he has forgiven them."

"They are upon the earth, and his spirit is not satisfied!" cried Oran, with the wild energy, and almost in the favourite language, of an Indian orator. "Have you rested under his roof? have you sat in his flower-garden? have you walked on his path by the Run-side? have you spoken with the people that drove him in his old age from his fireside? Hyland Gilbert! they broke his heart, and then trampled him to death. Will you not do him right and vengeance?"

"Oran!"----

"Changeling!" cried the refugee, with a scowl of savage contempt; "if you have not the feelings of a man, you have at least the gewgaw brain of a boy. Look!" he continued, drawing from his bosom, and displaying with a sneering grin, a roll of written parchment, decorated with the due pomp of martialness; "you begged for the toy that would make you a servant of the king; and here it is. Take it; and for the sake of a red coat and feather, do what you would not for the name and honour of your father."

Hyland--for the assumed name of the young Gilbert must now be dropped--recoiled from the emblem of distinction as much as from the frowning eyes of the speaker, but answered firmly,--

"When I was in the Islands, it is true, I desired the king's commission; and, it is also true, I left them to obtain it; and had I reached the royal army at my first landing, no doubt I should have accepted it. But it was my fate to be cast ashore far in the south; and I esteem it no bad fortune that I obeyed a whim of adventure, and made my way through my rebel countrymen (they are _ours_, Oran,) to this spot. I have thus been made acquainted with some of the principles on which this war is contested; whereby, I thank heaven, I have been spared the shedding of innocent blood in an unjust cause."

"Do you say this to me?" cried the refugee, with a wild laugh.

"Oran!" said the young man earnestly, "your heart is not with the side you have espoused; and fierce and cruel as may be your acts, they are, they must be, at variance with your conscience. A moment of fury drove you into a cause you abhor; and if you give the bloodiest proofs of your fidelity, you are impelled to them only by remorse and despair."

"You are a philosopher!" said the renegade, with another bitter laugh; "but we will play the fool no longer. Will you have the commission? See, it has the royal mark upon it!"

"Oran," said Hyland, mournfully, "after yourself, I am the last of my father's house. You ask me to do what has brought the others to their graves--to early and ignominious graves; and what, though you have been spared, has left you the prey of shame and sorrow. Why should I strike those men, who, besides fighting against tyrannous oppression, (such it was, Oran,) are also the children of the same soil--our countrymen and brothers?"

"You are the last of the seven," said the refugee, taking both the young man's hands into his, and looking at him with mingled affection and anger; "four of your brothers were slain--one of them hanged upon a gibbet--and all by 'our countrymen and brothers!' The fifth--look you, Hyland, the fifth--the second-born and the beloved, whose name was given you, that you might never forget him, fell in battle, saving the life of one of these--my countryman and my brother!"

The face of the outcast blackened, and Hyland trembled in his glance; he stepped out of the nook, and leading the young man along, conducted him up the hill to a place where a vista through the trees, looking over the green swamp, disclosed a glimpse of the blue ridgy cliffs of the Kittatinny, to which he pointed.

"Come with me to that mountain," he said, "and when you stand upon the summit, gazing to the right and to the left, you will look upon two graves. One of them lies in the desert, among the hills: I planted a pine tree on it, and you can see its blue head afar off. Do you remember who sleeps in it?"

"I do," said Hyland, with emotion; "it is my brother."

"And do you bethink you what laid him there?"

"His humanity and his noble heart."

"He died," said Oran Gilbert--"he died that a villain might live; and you call that villain 'my countryman and brother!'"

"No," said Hyland, with some of his wild brother's spirit; "I except _him_."

"Then look to the left," continued Oran, with a glance of painful humiliation: "on the brook, and in a little bower, there is a second grave."

"It is the grave of my poor wronged sister!" cried Hyland, impetuously.

"Of your sister, and of ----. Ha, ha! Is not this a merry subject for two brothers to talk on! 'My countryman and brother' destroyed her and fled."

"May heaven pardon him," cried Hyland; "but I cannot."

"We buried her in secret, and in night, that none might look upon her shame, or upon ours," said the refugee; "and that night came into the world her brother, whom we called Hyland, that we might better remember her destroyer."

"Oran! Oran!"

"Your mother," continued the elder brother, with a cruel pertinacity, "loved the girl well, and died of sorrow for her. My 'countrymen and brothers' pointed at our shame; they visited the sins of the children upon the father, and drove him forth in his old age, a childless and ruined man."

"They did," said the youth; "he came to the island, and he died in my arms."

"My 'countrymen and brothers,'" added Oran, with a ferocious sneer, "have left the oldest and youngest to weep for the others.--Here is the commission----We will avenge them!"

For a moment Hyland seemed to share the fire of the outcast; for a moment he grasped the parchment which the other had put into his hand. His face flushed,--then turned pale; he hesitated,--faltered; the badge of honour fell to the earth; and clasping his hands together, he looked at Oran imploringly, and said,

"My father died in my arms, and charged me, with his last breath, to forget that he had been wronged."

"It was the weakness of his death-hour," said Oran.

"He bade me," continued the youth, "leave his enemies to God, and the destroyer of his peace to his fate."

"Look at his fate!" cried the refugee: "wealth surrounds him, and he is envied for his happiness; while you are ashamed of your father's name, and I am poor, and abhorred, and miserable."

"We will go to the island, and forget"----

"Will you have the commission?" said Oran, abruptly. "You have youth, talents, education and fortune,--and will rise. This commission is to serve among the royal refugees; but if you carry it bravely at the first bout, I have the General's word you shall be transferred to the line, with a fair field for promotion."

"Look, Oran," said the youth, manfully, "I will not take the commission, nor will I trust your commander's promises. You have served him from the beginning; and none have served him better. How has he rewarded you?--You are still a captain of refugees!"

A shadow of humiliation passed over the face of the renegade; but he answered without emotion.

"I sought nothing better, nor am I fit for promotion. My station is where my habits and inclinations put me,--among the free rangers. But you have learning, youth, ambition; and are capable of training into discipline."

"I will not take the commission," said Hyland, with increasing resolution. "I have been enough with our people,--with the Americans,--to know that their cause is just, and holy, and is prevailing. Nay, you must know, that, at this moment, commissioners are deliberating over the preliminaries of negotiation, and that peace must soon be concluded."

"It is false," said the refugee, fiercely; "a trick of the ministers,--a common stratagem."

"True, or false, then, yet am I resolved to shed no blood in the quarrel; and, certainly, I will take no commission to distress the people of this neighbourhood. Oran, I am resolved; I will not fight; and I adjure you by the last wish of our poor father, and by your own hopes of future quiet, that you give up your schemes of blood, and leave this fatal valley for ever. Disband your followers; and take heed you be not suddenly deserted by your employers."

"Boy!" said the outlaw, "you are not white-livered, or you would not say these things to me! Look you, I know your folly: it is not for me,--not because you love liberty and peace,--not because you have laid to heart the dotish words of a half crazed father,--that you are so cold and shameless; but because you have set your eyes on the baby face of a girl, who will laugh at you, when the last fit of your folly is over. Hark you,--read me this knavish letter, and see what is already said of you."

"I have read it," said the young man, faltering.

"Ay, but read it again: let me know how far your madness has been talked of." And Hyland, summoning courage, took the letter and read it, though his embarrassment increased at the paragraph concerning himself, which had caused Oran to snatch it so suddenly from the hands of the volunteer. This paragraph, couched in the coarsest terms, expressed a knowledge of his affections, which had alarmed him at first excessively, though, it was probable, it was nothing more than the shrewd guess of a keen observer; and it concluded by showing how easily he might be 'nabbed, while at his gallivanting.'

"And this, then," cried the refugee, "it is that makes you so tame, so spiritless! Poor fool, could you look on none but the betrothed of a Falconer? Look you, boy, you are in a bear-trap, and the log will soon be on your back: with this baby fancy, shameful and dishonourable, you are gulling yourself into perdition."

"Oran," cried the young man, throwing himself upon the wild man's mercy, "this poor girl is betrothed against her will; and if no friend stands by her, there will be another broken heart laid by the side of Jessie. Do not scoff at me, or reproach me: she saved my life, she has treated me with a sister's kindness and trust; and if she will suffer me to aid her, I will rescue her from her misery, though I die for it."

"Do what you will," said Oran, with a gloomy frown: "though you had her heart and love, what will she say to you, when this cunning daughter of a villain, that sent yonder Parker to the rope, ferrets out your secret, and shows you to be a son of the Gilberts? Nay, what will others say to you? It is better to die as a soldier, than a spy!"

"I am no spy," said Hyland; "and when the time comes for disclosure, I will not fear to acknowledge my name."

"It will soon come," said the refugee. "Go," he added, sternly; "you are rushing upon destruction. Save yourself as you can, till midnight; and then take the commission, or be lost. Begone from this place; it will be soon full of soldiers--I have sent for them; and already they are coming.--Brother," he said, relenting, as the young man turned to depart: he strode after him and took him by the hand: "What have you or I to do with the love of woman? This is but a folly.--You have no friend or kinsman left to advise or help you.--Well, if the girl be willing to fly, why, put her upon a fleet horse, and to-morrow she shall be beyond the reach of a Falconer. It shall not be said, I deserted you, even in your folly."

How much further the wild and flinty outlaw might have been softened by the distress he saw pictured on his brother's face, cannot be told. The gentler feeling of affection beginning to yearn in his bosom, was chased away by a sudden sound like the flourish of a distant trumpet, which came trembling over the forest-leaves.

"Away," he cried hastily; "the curs are coming, and the troop with them. Dive into the swamp, and meet them on the road. To-night you shall see me."

So saying, he bounded down the hill with the activity of a mountain-buck, and was almost instantly lost to sight. The brother, crossing the swamp and brook, made his way to the road, some distance above the spot where he had dismounted.

END OF VOL. I.

THE HAWKS OF HAWK-HOLLOW.

A TRADITION OF PENNSYLVANIA.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "CALAVAR," AND "THE INFIDEL."

Where dwellest thou?---- Under the canopy,--i' the city of kites and crows. _Coriolanus_.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. II.

_Philadelphia_:

CAREY, LEA, & BLANCHARD.

1835.

Entered according to the act of Congress, in the year 1835, by CAREY, LEA, & BLANCHARD, in the clerk's office of the district court for the eastern district of Pennsylvania.

_I. Ashmead & Co. Printers_.

THE HAWKS OF HAWK-HOLLOW.